Where the Candidates Stand on Regulation
The US regulatory burden—nearly $2 trillion—demands close scrutiny of campaigners’ backgrounds and promises.
The US regulatory state is massive. Wayne Crews, the vice president for policy of the Competitive Enterprise Institute, is arguably the leading expert on US federal regulation. Every year, he writes a 100-plus-page report titled, appropriately enough, Ten Thousand Commandments: An Annual Snapshot of the Federal Regulatory State. Regulation, given its large costs, is one of the understudied aspects of presidential campaign proposals. In his latest report, written in 2023, Crews writes, “Regulatory burdens of $1.939 trillion amount to nearly 7.4 percent of US gross domestic product, which was $26.14 trillion in 2022.” If regulatory costs were a country, he notes, our federal regulatory costs would be the ninth-largest economy in the world.
It’s a good idea, therefore, to consider how regulatory or deregulatory Democratic candidate Kamala Harris and Republican candidate Donald Trump are. Although both presidential candidates have laid out broad goals, both also, with a few exceptions, have been vague about what regulations they favor. With some hesitance, therefore, I’ll consider which one is likely to favor more regulation and/or less deregulation. I’ll save you the suspense: the more regulation-oriented candidate, given her past history and what she calls her “values,” is almost certainly Kamala Harris.
These are the opening two paragraphs of my latest Hoover article, “Where the Candidates Stand on Regulation,” Defining Ideas, September 12, 2024.
Another highlight:
The biggest instance [of advocating regulation] is her advocacy of “Medicare for all.” She sponsored such a bill in 2019, a major provision of which was a complete ban on private employer-provided insurance. That’s a large regulation. While some pundits claim that she no longer believes in such a ban, she has not stated as such. Similarly, Harris is part of an administration that has used regulation to drastically increase the percentage of new cars that must be either electric vehicles or plug-in hybrids. Although Harris is rumored to have backed off her own 2020 proposal to completely ban production of cars with internal-combustion engines by 2035, Axios reported last week that she won’t say whether she still favors that policy. That is not a good sign. (Donald Trump, by contrast, would end the federal EV mandate, although he would step up regulation of the auto industry by “preventing the importation of Chinese vehicles.”)
Read the whole thing.